By Sylvain Beaud, Julie Djeffal & Timothée Lottaz
How have some countries' most typical food exports evolved over time? Food exports allowed people to have access to the most iconic foods and beverages of every countries in the world. The evolution of those trades is interesting for the general public: who has never tried Swiss chocolate, or Chinese tea? Some of these products have become more popular over time, like Quinoa, or Belgian beer. Can we see a clear trend? Maybe a map can help us find out. The scope of the project is to visualise the exportation of some countries' specialties over the years, in an interactive map.
Initially, we tried some libraries such as Datamaps to get a first impression. These libraries are easy to use but lack flexibility and customization options. Thus, we quickly switched to customized svg for the map, and Cytoscape, a powerful javascript graph library. On top of this, we used d3.js to help us with all aspects of the visualisation.
Our main focus, at this point, was to improve the visual aspect of our map. Along those modifications, we started to add elements to let the user interact with the map, the first of them being a timeline.
Then, we needed to create datastories. Up to this moment, we had implemented a tool to discover and play with the available data but we had to create stories to guide the user. Once those stories were seleceted, we needed to implement tools to actually express them. Most of those new elements consist of information panels displaying interesting insights and highlighting key events of each story. We also created specialized functions to enhanced the story-telling aspects of our visualisation.